Week of December 10-14

Hello from the light blue room!

We had a wonderful week together. This week, we have been talking about the second habit: "Beginning with the End in Mind." We read a story about this habit and the character Goob taught us the importance of starting our day by beginning with the end in mind. In the story, Goob makes sure to save his money so he has enough to do all of the things he wants to. He plans ahead and thinks of others before making choices.

Together, we thought about how each of us wanted to end our day. We talked about filling our fishbowls, helping mom and dad out at home, making a new friend, etc. We also drew pictures of ourselves beginning with the end in mind and wrote about those choices. We talked about how we could all reach our goals if we continue to be the leader of our choices each day.

Deputy Knott came in to talk to us about safety and how we can help our community to be safe.

This week we read a book called "Have You Filled a Bucket Today?" This book talks about how everyone in the world has an invisible bucket. When a person is feeling loved their bucket is full. We talked about how something as small as giving someone a smile can fill their bucket. We also talked about how when we fill other friend's buckets, we are also filling our own. We are using this term in our room when we talk about how our actions affect one another. We all want our room to be safe, happy, and a place where everyone feels loved with a full bucket. 

Checking out the police car!

We learned two new sight words this week: in, can. Your child should have come home with their first sight word list this week. Please study these words along with reading your child's JRL book. Every Tuesday I will be assessing students to see if they are ready to move on to their next list. Way to go readers!

We are continuing to talk about authors and illustrators in both reading and writing. Before reading books we talk about the author and what the book may be about just by the title and looking at the cover. In our daily fix-its, we continue to focus on the beginning of our sentence having an uppercase letter and punctuation marks. This week we learned about quotation marks and how they tell us when people in the book are talking.

Brody, Olivia, Abraham and Alexis writing and designing a thank you card for one of the donors of our school.  

Way to work as a team!

In writing this week we learned about writing lists. We discussed how writing comes in many different forms: stories, lists, letters, etc. As a class we talked about what a list might look like and how there are many different kinds of lists for many different reasons. We discussed how people may make grocery lists, chores lists, present lists and more. Individually we created our own personal lists and will continue working on them next week. Soon we will learn about writing letters!

In math this week we continued to work on simple addition and subtraction math equations. We also focused on the teen numbers and drawing numbers using 5-groups. We put two 5-groups together and added more tiles to make the teen numbers. We talked about how when we solve math equations, we can draw pictures, use our fingers or use math manipulatives if we need extra help. What a phenomenal group of mathematicians!

Memphis, Braylee and Abraham working on Frosty hats for our caroling!

On Monday, we finished our Civics and Government unit. Deputy Knott came in to discuss his role as a police officer in our community. He talked with us about community safety and how we can practice good citizenship. We also learned the Pledge of Allegiance. We talked about why we say it and where it came from. Later in our week we role played different safety situations and what we should do in those situations. We "practiced" calling 911 and talked about when to call and when not to. At the end of our week, we began our Economics unit. The students learned what a good was and classified different goods as needs or wants. Next week we will learn about services.

Notes/Reminders:

-Youngest Friend's field trip is this Wednesday, December 19 to the Appledorn Living Center. Please drop off your child's labeled car seat that morning or they will not be able to join us on the field trip.

-Spelling tests will begin when we come back from break.

-Please continue to review the sight word list your child brought home.

-The Beta high school students are putting a talent show together for this coming February. If your child is interested, please see the Innocademy blog for more information.

-Growth portfolios will be sent home again this Thursday.

Have a great week!

Ms. Monica